Today, my partner and I took advantage of some perfect weather and a day off to walk around one of MSU’s gardens and enjoy some nature curated and cultivated in a human aesthetic. As an agricultural school, Michigan State has any number of gardens to sit in and read, and for today’s garden, we’re sitting in a horticultural demostration garden.

At one end of the garden, tucked away, the garden’s curators have created a strange sort of craft project. A bee hotel built of tiny bird houses full of tiny straws and drilled holes. A sign outside explains that most bees are solitary sorts, preferring a single dwelling to a hive. Though they’re useful pollinators and good at eating pests, they don’t make honey as such and they live in small holes. Like those in the bee hotel. A peak into one of these with my hand lens reveals one of its denizens poking its head out like an old man leaning out into the hall in a flop house.

On the edge of its tubular cell, a pile of yellow dust made me wonder, what could that be? I had an idea, but I also had my microscope on hand. So no need to merely guess. I could look. I gathered a pile from one room into the well of a slide, and took a look.

Theory confirmed: it was a pile of pollen left behind by one of the bees. As food, I suspect. I showed this to some children walking by, who were less concerned with the pollen than with a general worry about the bees. But then another pile made me wonder. Were all the bees eating the same pollen? A separate pile of powder gave me a chance to check this out.

The shape of each grain of pollen is completely different in this pile. What’s more, they aren’t mixed types of pollen, as I would expect if they were eating generally. So I think that they must be eating from one plant or another. This could either be because a single species prefers a single plant or it could be because I am looking at a single meal from a single bee on a single day of the year.

Regardless it reminds me of the joy of using these instruments as field microscopes and that discovering what exists on the smallest levels can show us not just what is there, but can illuminate how the creatures around us live.

"...even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough in the earthly make and incontestable character of the monster to strike the imagination with unwonted power. For, it was not so much his uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm whales, but, as was elsewhere thrown out- a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump. These were his prominent features; the tokens whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he revealed his identity, at a long distance, to those who knew him.

The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive appellation..."--Herman Melville, Moby Dick

I remember in the biology classes I took in college the way the history of biological scales was laid out to me. The size of the world seemed pretty clear. On the one side lived multicellular creatures like you or I (I presume...and if I'm incorrect, please let me know!), and on the other were the single celled creatures. Single-celled creatures had been hidden from sight for much of human history. Only when van Leeuwenhoek finally brought his lens to their world did we gain the power to see them, for the protozoa were denizens of the microcosmos and could be counted on, for all their multitude of forms, to be microscopic.

Or were they? Anyone who has read my posts here knows I'm obsessed with the way we think of scale in biology. Humans tend to think of ourselves as more or less normal sized creatures from which anything else could be measured as larger or smaller, but this is, after all, not strictly true. To my cat, we are behemoths (who are inexplicably bad at running, hunting, smelling, hearing, or using our claws; but that's a different post), and to the fruit flies I raised, our apartment is an entire world. On the other end of the spectrum, the rotifers we look at are all multicellular creatures, but they are so small themselves that they are sometimes dwarfed by the ciliates they hunt. And then, there is the Stentor coeruleus, a monster in its taxonomical kingdom.

The first time I encountered a stentor, I misidentified it as a rotifer. Laksiyer corrected me and called it the king of the ciliates. That wasn't an S. coeruleus but a smaller variety clinging to a plant; it had the decency to remain in its scale, invisible to my eyes. When I found a specimen of the larger species, it appeared to my naked eye as a dark blue dot hanging on the meniscus of a sample of pond water. When I drew it into my eyedropper, I assumed I was getting an interesting glob of algae or a colony of bacteria. When it moved, I was overjoyed.

Not a white whale, but a blue one, tinted a bright cyan from its partnership with blue-green algae that live in its body. As it moves, it periodically sheds these in bursts of pigmented goop.

What makes the stentor so interesting to me is not merely that they are a very large single-celled creature. It is what the size of the creature allows us in terms of observing and documenting the microcosmos. Under even a low-powered lens, the organelles of the stentor are clearly visible. In particular, its macronuclei, strung along the length of its body like costume jewelry pearls.

Even more interesting, you can see the texture of its cellular membrane. Long striations of fibers up and down its body that allow it to change form and stretch to great lengths. You can see the way its mouth curls into a spiral, a divot where the vortex of its cilia leads its prey.

In this way, the stentor also tickles my other obsession on this site: the aesthetics of scientific viewing. The world presented through a light microscope so often seems to be a two dimensional one, but here is a creature that is aggressively three dimensional. Once again, the light microscope becomes a tool for aesthetic and empathetic sight, in addition to, and as a part of, scientific observation. In looking at it, we get a glimpse of what the world looks like at a microscopic scale. We get a view of what the protists living in its world experience when they encounter this great whale.